Pakistani military tramples due process

McClatchy Newspapers

Updated 11:14 pm, Sunday, February 10, 2013

Islamabad --

A year ago, Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered the country's military to produce seven men who had been held in a secret prison after the civilian terrorism charges against them had collapsed. It was a dramatic scene, as the men, who hadn't been seen in years, appeared in court - emaciated, ill, with one carrying a colostomy bag.

The shock was so great that Rohaifa Bibi, the 59-year-old mother of two of the men, suffered a heart attack that night and died.

The men, however, did not gain their freedom. Instead, they were shunted into a military internment system that is a glaring example of how Pakistan's legal system has failed to cope with Islamic extremist violence ignited by the country's alliance with the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Poor investigations by intelligence agencies and police and low rates of convictions by the courts have prompted the military to take justice into its own hands. That's resulted in the abduction of suspected extremists by intelligence agents, extrajudicial killings, and the trampling of due process.

On Monday, the Supreme Court again takes up the case, which originally involved 11 men who disappeared in late 2007. Four, however, died in custody in unexplained circumstances. The remaining seven men are being held in "internment centers" that were established under a sweeping law passed in 2011.

In a court hearing last month, the authorities admitted holding 700 suspected militants in those centers. Human-rights activists believe the actual figure is much higher.

The story of the men whose cases are now before the Supreme Court begins in November 2007, when intelligence agents raided the Bibi family's book printing business in Lahore, picking up three of her sons.

The deeply religious brothers printed the Quran and other Islamic books at their press and had supplied texts to Islamabad's radical Red Mosque. They and eight others were charged with involvement in multiple terrorist attacks, including the bombing of a bus carrying personnel of the Inter-Services Intelligence spy agency in September 2007.

But the case against them fell apart, and a court ordered them released in May 2010. Instead, intelligence agents reportedly turned up at the jail and took the 11 men away.

Body dumped

What had become of them was unknown until January 2012, when Abdul Qudoos, another of Bibi's sons, received a phone call, telling him to collect the body of one of his detained brothers, Abdul Saboor, 29. At a bus station in Peshawar, Qudoos found a withered body, covered in lice, dumped inside an ambulance.

That's when the case first came to the attention of the Supreme Court, which ordered the military to present the surviving prisoners.

The issue is whether the military can use the internment centers, which were authorized to house militants captured in operations against the Taliban in the country's northern tribal areas, to keep prisoners picked up in other circumstances. The 2011 law that set up the internment camps allows conviction in military-run courts on the testimony of a single soldier.

At a hearing last month, Pakistan's attorney general, Irfan Qadir, told the Supreme Court that none of the seven remaining suspects could be freed until the end of operations in the tribal areas. But the activist chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, demanded that the men be put on trial.